[Warner is an English novelist, nonfiction writer, and critic vhose scholarly works include Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981). In the following, she unfavorably reviews The Midnight Love Feast.]

The lovers sculpted out of sand in the beach below Mont St Michel are lapped by the tide and eventually overwhelmed; their creator dances to the sweet unheard music of the "salty tongues" of the sea and exclaims at the beauty of the French word volubile. Nature abhors silence, he declares, and as they engulf his art, the waves represent new life, "a baby burbling in its cradle". [In The Midnight Love Feast] Yves and Nadège, who come across the sculptor on the shore, are long married and afflicted with silence; they feel the time has come to separate, and they decide to hold a farewell symposium for all their friends, at which everyone will tell a story. This "Midnight Love Feast", this rising tide of language, does not sweep them away, but unexpectedly restores them to happiness. "Literature as a panacea for couples in distress", comments Nadège on the happy outcome.

The controlled cleverness of this schema encloses many Tournier themes: the rivalry between nature and artifice for the golden apple labelled "for the most beautiful", the power of story to shape reality in its image, the decadent raptures over destruction and life-in-death. The main theme belongs to fairy-tales, of course, though in The Arabian Nights Scheherazade invents her stories to save herself, and in Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti, the narrators uncover, detective-style, a culprit in their midst. By contrast, Tournier's protagonists are passive recipients of their guests' nineteen healing parables, and the shift reflects the author's perception of literature as liturgy and himself as a modern hierophant in an ancient storytelling freemasonry. The formulae he uses are Christian: Yves's last supper of fish gathered by himself and one or two others, the Mass, the vigil, the eucharistic sharing of food. Reconciled, Nadège explicitly invests Yves with sacerdotal powers in the high-flown language that Tournier affects: "You shall be the high priest of my kitchens and the guardian of the culinary and manducatory rites that invest a meal with its spiritual dimension."

The imagery may be sacramental, the desire to instruct, to perform miracles and uphold the power of the Word may be all of a piece with a Christian outlook, but Tournier's content famously does not conform to traditional piety, stories in The Midnight Love Feast would make Don Giovanni falter on his way to a tryst; far from reaffirming a marriage, they might help convince a suicide she was in her right mind. The realist nouvelles are filled with ugly acts of greed, pandering, revenge, in the lurid tradition of Maupassant or even Sue; some of the concise "legends" or fables that follow introduce a new, sunnier, charming tone more congruent with a happy ending, but they are distressingly feeble: an arch little conceit on the names of French perfumes, a winsome just-so story about the invention of petits-pains au chocolat, a plot to explain the nursery rhyme "Au clair de la lune". Not a single marked female voice enters the chorus, though two male narrators remember how women lured and trapped them, while another uncovers a squalid story of a wartime collaborator and her public degradation. A memory lapse on Tournier's part is perhaps significant: when someone mentions Ulysses' descent into the underworld, he says that Ulysses' mother did not dare drink the sacrificial blood that would enable her to speak to her son. In Tournier, mothers do not give voice; though in Homer, Anticleia drinks and speaks to Ulysses, at some length.

Tournier's message seems to be that the daily round, ceremonially performed, holds the secret of happiness, and his final parable, the most satisfying in the collection, teaches that by repetition, daily tasks are ritualized into art—the tired married couple can become the superb lovers on the beach. (In the photograph on the dust-jacket, of an actual sculpture by Patricio Lagos, who is a real-life sand artist, the bodies are in point of fact male.)

Tournier's highly wrought prose suffers seriously in translation. Michael Sheringham, reviewing the French version Le Médianoche amoureux (TLS August 11-17, 1989), described the style as "fulsome". Whoever is speaking, the tone is equally lofty, learned, and richly classical; "halieutic", "gangue", "olfactory", "manducatory" and even, "paludal mucosae" fall from the lips of storytellers of every condition. In French this has a quality of the seventeenth-century précieux about it, and doesn't become outlandish. In English, however, it veers dangerously into the wind of ridicule, all show-off airs and graces and mock portentousness. Barbara Wright's method is to forge ahead, ignoring the silly sniggerers in the congregation, and to stay with the nearest English phonetic equivalent; she also does this, less understandably, with common words, keeping "lamentable", "mutism", or even "puerile" (giving the odd "my puerile madonna" instead of "my child madonna"); she sometimes prefers not to translate at all, as with Numéro 5, when Chanel Number 5 must be one of the most familiar things French this side of the Channel, unlike Tournier's quotidian epiphany of halieutic comestibles: the fishy fare of the daily round made plain.